yak shaving

Ifar: You said you were writing about population pressure and sustainability issues, so why are you asking me how to put a fuzzy border around a picture of a yak?

Trin: I started a post about attitudes toward mitigating population pressure then realized there are a similar set of attitudes about global warming. Then I thought it would be smart to check out what other bloggers have said recently on that topic which led me to a post by Joe Carter at The Evangelical Outpost, so I decided to just write about his post.

Ifar: Evangelical Outpost? That’s not your normal cup of tea.

Trin: True. Joe’s a Christian evangelical and social conservative. But his blog is the most popular one on the web for people like him, and they’ve got a lot of power these days with all the politicians courting their votes.

Ifar: Okay. So what’s with the yak?

Trin: I wanted to add a picture to the post to go with the title I’m using, “Yak Shaving.”

Ifar: How’s that connected to mitigating population pressure?

Trin: You need to do a lot of yak shaving to solve big problems.

Ifar: Come again?

Trin: Yak shaving is a hip term for useful, necessary tasks that at first glance appear to be unrelated to what you said you were doing. I learned it from Joe.

Ifar: Oh. So load the yak picture into GIMP and run the “fuzzy border” script while I go herd some more yaks for you.

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In his post, Joe Carter looks at attitudes toward AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming, warming caused by human activity) along three dimensions:

The three dimensions:

1. the jury is out on climate warming, or it may be real but not significantly affected by human activity.
2. the long-term effects of AGW range from catastrophic to mild.
3. how quickly do we need to respond to AGW?
   1. never, since we can’t do anything about it or the human component is too small to bother.
   2. right now, since any delay might have permanent negative consequences.
   3. sometime later, there’s time to study to ensure we take meaningful action.

Considering only the discrete possibilities associated with the tick-marks on the axes, there are 12 locations on the three dimensional grid, five of which are meaningful:

Joe gives these names. Three of the five take the position of do nothing on the when-to-take-action axis:

• Hopeless Pessimist: AGW is quite real but we can’t do anything about it. So don’t bother doing anything.
• Do-Nothing Optimist: AGW is quite real but the long-term effects are not significant. So don’t bother doing anything.
• Skeptical Optimist: AGW is not a sure thing, and even it is true the consequences aren’t that bad. So don’t bother doing anything.

Joe notes that none of these are politically viable positions in the USA today. With respect to the last one, Skeptical Optimist, he says,

Although it may be a valid personal position to hold — perhaps even the correct position — as a policy opinion, it is currently a loser. In time, as new evidence is presented, this may change.

He doesn’t say explicitly, but it may be that Joe doesn’t accept the IPCC summary report (PDF) prepared by more than 2,000 scientists from 154 countries as mentioned in this Scientific American article and discussed in this post on RealClimate (a blog by climate scientists) and in this newspaper article.

There are two other meaningful positions on the grid:

• Act-Now Optimist: AGW is large, dangerous, and we must start mitigation efforts now.
• Act-Later Optimist: AGW is large, dangerous, but we have some time to study before acting (or, rather than act rashly, let’s take some time an ensure we don’t harm the economy).

Joe dismisses the Act-Now Optimist with the “I’m not going to do the right thing unless everyone does” argument:

The problem with acting now is that even if we could agree on what action would be most effective, we couldn’t force the international community to commit to such action. No matter what policies we adopt in the U.S., if China and India refuse to make the same changes the effect will be minimal. Since they refuse to make sacrifices today for a potential benefit that may not accrue for another century, anything we do is moot.

Many on the right are offering this line of thinking. Yet the European Union has already signed on to the Kyoto accord and is in the process of adding additional measures just for the EU. On the left coast California is stepping up following the lead of a group of northeast and mid-atlantic states. Initiatives like these not only mitigate global warming but put significant pressure on China, India, and others to fall in line. Why wait to act until everyone is on board? Can we not simply take the moral high-ground? Every reduction in carbon emissions is good for future generations.

Joe continues,

By default, we are left with the Act-Later option. The hope is that we will either have found a technological solution to anthropocentric climate change or we will have acquired the political will to act decisively. The danger, of course, is that we will have waited until it’s too late. But delaying taking direct action on global warming does not mean that we cannot take action at all.

If, like me, you are in the Act-Now camp don’t dismiss Joe’s statement too quickly. There’s much good in it — for example, the bit about acquiring the political will to act decisively and the acknowledgement of the danger of waiting until it is too late. Most importantly he says we don’t have to refrain from taking some action now. That’s the yak shaving bit. Even if apparently far removed for the end goal, many things are useful stepping stones in the right direction.

Joe’s idea is to address a problem that’s related to global warming (and, by the way, to population pressure and sustainability): poverty. Libertarians aside, this is something conservatives and liberals as well as evangelicals, Jews, Muslims, and atheists can all get behind.

Bravo, Joe!